US election time. Mainstream media are spending an huge amount of money to cover all sort of debates, pools, and talk, talk and still talk about useless things.
I think one of the most useful website to understand what is happening and which kind of policies will the future president promote, is Opensecrets.org.
It has an impressive amount of data: how much money is spent on this US presidential election, which sectors gives more money to which candidate, and so on.
I made a quick research and found some interesting stuffs. I found the total amount of money given by the sector defined as "Finance/Insurance/Real Estate" to the two main presidential candidates. And I present here the data for the three last US presidential elections (2012-2008-2004).
2004 elections:
The Finance sector gives 19 million more to Republicans than to Democrats.
Republican's George W. Bush wins.
2008 elections:
The Finance sector gives 11 million more to Democrats than to Republicans.
Democrat's Barack Obama wins.
2012 elections:
The Finance sector gives 34 million more (!) to Republicans than to Democrats.
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Now let's have a look at the "Top 5 contributors" to the two candidates:
Obama: University of Californa (1th), Microsoft, Google, US Government, Harvard.
Romney: Goldman Sachs (1th), Bank of America, Morgan Stanely, JPMorgan, Credit Suisse. I don't think I need to comment on it.
Conculsions? We cannot say that there is a causal relation, of course. And I cannot say that Mitt Romney will win the election because of this.
However, it is crystal clear that whoever will win, the financial sector will continue to play a fundamental role in the policy-making, as already does. Don't you believe it? It is plenty of evidence, for some more enterteining just have a look at the movie "Too big to fail".
On tuesday we will know if all this means something. Would it not be (at least) funny? Stay tuned!
